Monday, November 3, 2014

Part of Chennai moves on
arterial Anna Salai (Mount Road) ~ the
city has choked many a times whenever political agitation or a show of strength
by any leader left the city
paralysed. With Chennai Metro rail,
something impossible happened – traffic on this main was regulated – read as ‘made
one way in phases’. Many eye-brows were
raised when effective Mar 2012, prime
part of the Mount Road after Devi Paradise complex – from Wellington junction was
made one way – now years passing by, the
city is sort of used to the one way and traffic is flowing freely.

Regulars would observe that
it does not continue to be what it is – the portions motorable keep changing,
for, work is going on under the ground. It is very complex – tunnelling work
under a road which has such high flow of traffic; loose soil; water table being
high and more. There are three
consortiums involved in the underground construction. Read that the tunnelling work of the Chennai
Metro was carried out by twelve tunnel boring machines (TBMs) working on forty
tunnel sections covering 38 km. A tunnel
is an underground or underwater passageway, dug through the surrounding
soil/earth/rock and enclosed except for entrance and exit, commonly at each
end.

Conventional Tunnelling can
be defined as the construction of underground openings of any shape with a
cyclic construction process comprising of excavation, mucking, placement of
primary support. Conventional Tunnelling is carried out in a cyclic execution
process of repeated steps of excavation followed by the application of relevant
primary support. As in the case of
Metro, modern day tunnelling is done by a tunnel boring machine (TBM) also known as a
"mole", a machine used to
excavate tunnels with a circular cross section through a variety of soil and
rock strata.

The Baker Street robbery
was a robbery of the safe deposit boxes at 185 Lloyds Bank on the corner of
Baker Street and Marylebone Road, London, on the night of 11th Sept 1971. The robbers had
rented a leather goods shop named Le Sac, two doors down from the bank, and
tunnelled a distance of approximately 50 feet (15 m) passing under the
intervening Chicken Inn restaurant.

Three days after thieves were found to have cleaned
out 78 lockers from a bank in Sonipat, police on Thursday claimed to have
cracked the multi-crore heist even as the alleged mastermind was mysteriously
found dead in his car. TOI reports quote
Police as saying that Mahipal -the alleged brain behind the heist who owned the
abandoned house from where the thieves dug an 84-foot-long tunnel to the Punjab
National Bank branch's locker room, had
committed suicide. His body was found on Panipat Road around 3pm. It had no
visible injuries. Police said the autopsy report was awaited.

The Haryana police have arrested three of the four
other suspects. All of them are from the neighbouring Kathwal village and,
strangely, none of them has a major criminal record. Police said they recovered
39kg of gold and silver ornaments and some cash. Satish, a property dealer,
Surender, a lab technician, and Balraj, an ‘agriculturist,' are the three
arrested in connection with the sensational Sonipat heist. Search is on to nab
the fourth suspect, Rajesh. “Mahipal was the main conspirator. He involved the
four others to execute the job. We suspect Mahipal committed suicide because he
feared being caught,” Arun Singh, Sonipat superintendent of police, told TOI.

The PNB branch where the heist took place is on
Gohana Road. TOI visited the spot and found a 10-12 feet wide street separated
it from Mahipal’s house, where the tunnel began. The strong room, where the
lockers were present, is at the extreme end of the building that housed the
bank. Police claim the four thieves would visit the house at night and work on
the tunnel till dawn. They used heavy iron rods, spades and trowels (khurpa) to
dig the tunnel and they broke open the locker using a jack, said officials. The digging was done with such finesse that
telephone cables and water pipelines in the tunnel remained completely
untouched. The tunnel was about three feet high and 2-3 feet wide.

“The bank has 350 lockers. The thieves managed to
decamp with valuables kept in 78 of them. They broke open a total of 86
lockers,” said a source. Police were taken aback by the profile of the
suspects. “It is surprising that these novices managed to make such an
elaborate plan and execute it with precision. Also, the mysterious death of
Mahipal raises more questions than answers about this bank heist. The real
story, I feel, is yet to come out,” said an investigating official. He did not
rule out the possibility of a bank employee or customer being involved. But
police, on record, denied any such theory. The involvement of PMO, which sent a
senior official to look into this case a day after it was reported, has also
led to speculation here.

With regards – S.
Sampathkumar

31st Oct 2o14

Quoted portion of Sonipat
heist and infographic – credits : Times
of India.